Elmer Belt

Arthur Elmer Belt was born in Chicago, Illinois on April 10, 1893. His father was a postmaster. The family moved to Southern California when Belt was nine. Elmer Belt (the form of name he preferred) received his early education in Orange County, but attended Los Angeles High School, traveling there on horseback. During high school he took courses in Latin, a medical school prerequisite, and met Ruth Smart, whom he would eventually marry in 1918.

Belt attended the University of California Berkeley, obtaining a B.A. in 1916 and an M.A. in 1917. (He was a member of the first class taught by Herbert McLean Evans.[1]) He then attended the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, where he was chosen as a fellow of the Hooper Institute for Medical Research, working with Dr. George Whipple and Dr. Frank Hinman. After finishing medical school in 1920, Belt continued working in urology with Dr. Hinman. Following a year as Resident in Urology with Dr. Hinman in San Francisco, Dr. Belt ended his fellowship for personal reasons: his oldest son Bruce had been in a serious auto accident and his father felt he would receive better from famed orthopedist Robert W. Lovett at Harvard Medical School. So Belt applied for a residency in General Surgery at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and spent a year working under Dr. Harvey Cushing.

While in medical school, Belt had signed up for a non-credit elective course in the History of Medicine taught by Dr. George Washington Corner, an anatomist who had recently come to the University of California from Johns Hopkins. It was during this class that Belt developed his lifelong interest in Leonardo da Vinci. It was, he relates, "in that course that I was assigned the subject of Leonardo da Vinci . . . and I was so fascinated that I began collecting everything I could about him."[2]

In 1923, Belt and his wife moved to Los Angeles, where he began a private practice. In 1936 he established the Elmer Belt Urologic Group, which occupied its own building at 1893 Wilshire Boulevard. One floor of the building housed Dr. Belt's ever-expanding library. During this period, due to his rising prominence in his profession, he enjoyed privileges as a staff, attending, or consulting urologist at many hospitals around Los Angeles County.

In addition to specializing in urology, Belt was a passionate advocate for public health and, from 1939 through 1954, served as the President of the State Board of Public Health. First appointed to this position by California Governor Culbert Olsen, Belt was reappointed by Governor Earl Warren for each of the latter's three terms in office. In the public health arena, Belt's projects included working to establish the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant for Los Angeles. He also advocated for the care and rights of refugees from the Dust Bowl who had settled in Tulare County. And during WWII, he campaigned for funds to treat what was then called venereal disease and to control prostitution, which posed serious problems around army and naval encampments in the state.

From the time he returned to California from Boston in 1923, Belt advocated for the establishment of a medical school at UCLA.[3] Despite his growing status and influence, his efforts were thwarted by historical events, the Great Depression and WWII, which preoccupied the energies, and affected the educational developments, of the time. However, in 1945, after the war ended, Belt was able to mount a lobbying campaign for his cause with the Appropriations Committee of the State Legislature. Moreover, he had by this time become personal physician to Governor Earl Warren, and during one momentous personal consultation, he delivered an impassioned plea to Warren that a medical school be established on UCLA's Westwood campus. Before he left Belt's office, Warren took out a notebook and jotted down a ten-step action plan for getting the project off the ground and through the state legislature. As the tenth and final step, Warren wrote, “Come and stand behind me when I sign this [legislation].”[4] On February 19, 1946, with Belt and a few other dignitaries standing behind him, Warren signed a bill appropriating $7 million dollars for a medical school at UCLA.[4]

Dr. Belt helped recruit the School of Medicine's first dean, Stafford Warren, who was appointed in 1947. In the fall of 1951, the medical school enrolled its first class, which consisted of 30 students -- 28 men and two women. Because there was as yet no building to house the medical school, classes were held in temporary bungalows and in a building UCLA had purchased that had formerly been known as the Religious Conference Building. At this time, there were 15 faculty members, including Elmer Belt, who served as Clinical Professor of Surgery (Urology). The main sites for clinical work and research in these nascent days of the School were the UCLA-affiliated hospitals of the Veterans Administration (the Wadsworth Hospital) in Brentwood; and the Veterans Administration Hospital in Long Beach. An affiliation was also established with Harbor Hospital in Torrance in 1951, at which point it, too, became a teaching hospital for the UCLA School of Medicine. In 1955 the university completed work on the UCLA Medical Center, giving the Medical School a permanent home. Not long afterwards, University of California President Gordon Sproul characterized Belt as "The Life Belt of the UCLA Medical School."[5] Belt remained a staunch supporter of the School for the rest of his life.

Several sources credit Elmer Belt as the first surgeon in the United States to regularly perform gender-confirmation surgery.[6]

Elmer Belt was performing gender-reassignment surgeries by the early 1950s. Unfortunately, establishing an exact chronology of his work in this field may be impossible. Such surgery was controversial at the time and kept private as much as possible. Further, a fire in Dr. Belt's medical group office in 1958 destroyed patient records and correspondence prior to that year; and severe mildew damage affecting seven boxes of surviving records that were later transferred to UCLA had to be discarded.

Answering the question of where Belt's earliest surgeries took place depends on when they took place. If the date is 1950, then they must have occurred outside UCLA and the most likely place is Good Samaritan Hospital, where Dr. Belt's Urologic Group's surgical practice was conducted.

But, if the date is 1951, then some surgeries must have been performed under the auspices of UCLA at a UCLA-affiliated hospital. At the time, UCLA had affiliations with the Veterans Hospital in West Los Angeles, he Veterans Administration Hospital in Long Beach, and the Los Angeles County Harbor General Hospital in Long Beach. It is a matter of record that UCLA was involved in sex-change operations because in 1954 a committee of UCLA doctors decided that these surgeries should no longer be performed under the auspices of the university, thus establishing that medical staff connected with the school had been doing them up to that point.

In his private practice, Belt continued to perform gender-confirmation surgeries until the 1960s. In a letter to a prospective patient dated January 2, 1962, Dr. Belt states, "There is a hospital near my office in Los Angeles to which we may take cases of the type which you describe in your request. Here we may carry out the necessary surgery without publicity and under perfect surgical conditions with good aftercare."[7]

Dr. Belt received referrals from sexologist Dr. Harry Benjamin; Dr. LeMon Clark, professor of Gynecology at the University of Arkansas and editor of Sexology Magazine; and others. Many prospective patients wrote to directly to Dr. Belt, who responded to these inquiries thoroughly and with compassion, as can be ascertained in surviving correspondence in the Elmer Belt Papers housed in UCLA Library Special Collections, Medicine and Science.[7]

Dr. Belt performed primarily male-to-female operations but did also perform female-to-male surgeries. Some of his most well known patients were Patricia Morgan, Mario Martino, and Aleshia Brevard.[8]

Owing to concerns about potential legal and reputational issues, and the increasing difficulty of finding hospitals that would allow the surgeries, as well as objections from his family and office manager, Dr. Belt ceased performing sex change operations sometime in the 1960s.

A lifelong bibliophile, Dr. Belt began collecting books as a boy and, by his mid-teens, had assembled a prized collection of dime novels. Unfortunately, Belt's mother did not understand how important this collection was to him, and she discarded it when he went to college -- a loss he lamented for the rest of his life.[9]

Dr. Belt also collected works by Upton Sinclair and, in 1934, supported Sinclair's campaign for governor of California. He donated his Upton Sinclair collection to Occidental College Library in 1950.

In addition, Dr. Belt formed collections around nursing educator Florence Nightingale and neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell. He donated both of these collections to the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library at UCLA.

Belt married the former Mary Ruth Smart (1891?-1983) in 1918. After they settled permanently in los Angeles in 1923, she became a social and cultural leader in the city. She served on the Los Angeles Library Commission and the Opera Guild of Southern California. She also was president of the UCLA Art Council and helped launch major fundraising events for that group. In 1959, she led a drive to add 35 cents for the city tax rate to help pull elementary schools out of financial straits. She was as well a founding director of the World Affairs Council and national vice president of the Travelers Aid Society. She died on January 9, 1983.[11]

The Belts had two sons, Bruce Gregory Belt and Charles Elmer Belt.

Bruce Belt (1926-2012), pressured by his father to follow in his footsteps, became a urologist and practiced medicine in the Elmer Belt Urological Group for some 20 years. However, he was not comfortable with his father's work performing sex-change operations. Later, when the medical field became embroiled in what became known as the Malpractice Crisis of 1970, which involved a spike insurance in premiums that led physicians to seek relief from some legal liability they thought had been unfairly imposed upon them, Bruce Belt decided to step away from medicine and reconsider his life's work. Thereafter, he embarked on a teaching career, becoming a successful and popular teacher of Biology and Latin at the Brentwood School.

Charles attended the University of Southern California.

Elmer Belt was the uncle of Dr. Willard Elmer Goodwin, M.D. (1915-1998), founding chair of the Division of Urology in the Department of Surgery at the UCLA School of Medicine, best known for his innovative techniques in urology and his work in organ and graft transplantation. Like his uncle, Dr. Goodwin performed gender confirmation surgeries.[12]

The Belt Residence was located at 2201 Fern Dell Place in Los Feliz.

Not long after suffering a major stroke, Belt died on May 17, 1980 at age 87.[13][7]

• Belt, Elmer (1955), Leonardo the anatomist, Logan Clendening lectures on the history and philosophy of medicine, Ser. 4, Univ. of Kansas Press, OCLC 255148312
• Belt, Elmer (1937), Surgical teaching through motion pictures, A. R. Fleming co, OCLC 58932480

• 1951: honorary Phi Beta Kappa key[14]
• 1962: honorary Doctor of Laws degree, University of California, Los Angeles[15]
• 1972: Sir Thomas More Medal for Book Collecting, University of San Francisco
• 1977: Aesculapian Award, University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine[16]

• The Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana